BWA - Biological warfare agent detectors

One of the challenges with biological detection is air normally has biological entities in it, which is very different from chemical detection where you are looking for the presence of a unique chemical that normally isn’t there. There are a few different technologies that can be used to measure and quantify biological materials such as immune-assay, PCR, or DNA analysis. These technologies are expensive and time consuming in order to get results, so it is important to combine these with another technology which is able to monitor an airstream continuously and provide a trigger for when a sample should be taken. Continuous monitoring for biological materials is a job well suited for Flame Spectroscopy. Our technology is able to differentiate between biological and non-biological particles by looking for and identifying materials found in RNA.

An additional challenge with biological detection is the amount of biological activity can vary based upon a number of different factors such as the time of year, humidity/temperature, sensor location, as well as the amount of human activity. It is important to first establish a baseline of biological. The AP4C technology is able to accomplish this by first establishing a baseline and then looking for deviations from this baseline. An additional benefit of our technology is that we are able to do chemical detection at the same time we are doing biological detection, therefore both can be done in a single detector simultaneously.